Between the slicked-back ponytails, tight box braids, heavy extensions, and dyes, your locks are can look worse for the wear real quick — and even actress La La Anthony isn’t immune to those disheartening side effects.
“Right before the pandemic I really noticed how bad my real hair was getting,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “My edges were thinning really bad, my hair wasn’t growing at all, and every time I washed my hair it was falling out.”
Naturally, the damage caused her to freak “the f%#k out‼️,” so she did what any panicking beauty guru would do: hunt down DIY remedies on YouTube, Anthony told Allure. “I started experimenting with rice water…I was making it in my kitchen and using it every single day and I started noticing a dramatic difference,” Anthony wrote on Instagram.
Over the course of two years, the actress worked with a team of beauty experts to improve her at-home beauty treatment and bottle it up for the public. And now, the product — The Power Potion (Buy It, $55, shopinala.com), a serum infused with rice water, biotin, and arginine and designed to strengthen hair and stimulate growth — is finally available through Anthony’s own hair-care brand, INALA.
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“Use it on your edges, use it on your entire head, use it on your eyebrows, use it wherever you want to make your hair stronger and healthier and see growth and just start feeling good about yourself again,” she wrote on Instagram. (Related: These Hair Growth Treatments Are All Over TikTok — Are They Worth Trying?)
Thanks to those ingredients, The Power Potion can increase hair growth in as little as four to six weeks when applied twice daily, according to the brand. And that claim may have some legitimacy: Centuries ago, Japanese women, “whose beautiful long hair reached to the floor,” were said to have applied rice water (the water left over after washing of rice) to their hair daily, according to research published in the Journal of Cosmetic Chemists. Rice water contains amino acids and inositol (a type of carb) that may help strengthen hair, and, in an animal study, rice bran extract was shown to promote hair growth and significantly increase the number of hair follicles. (FTR, biotin hasn’t been proven to be effective for hair growth in healthy people, and there currently aren’t any studies that support arginine supplementation to treat hair loss.)
Need further evidence? Take a look at Anthony’s before-and-after photos, which show noticeable growth along her hairline after 60 days of use, according to the brand.
While the brand also sells a scalp massager, bamboo comb, and silk pillowcase to help “improve circulation” and prevent further damage to your locks, The Power Potion is currently INALA’s sole hair-growth treatment. Moving forward, the brand will take customers’ feedback on the serum as well as their wants and needs into consideration to develop other products down the line, Anthony told WWD.
